Invented Landscape
Artist
Carlos Diaz
(American, born 1951)
Datec. 2003
MediumPhotographic collage
DimensionsImage Size: 8 1/2 × 12 in. (21.6 × 30.5 cm)
Frame Size: 21 1/2 × 25 1/2 in. (54.6 × 64.8 cm)
ClassificationsPhotograph
Credit LineBequest of James Pearson Duffy, 2015
Object numberUAC6330
DescriptionCarlos Diaz’s Invented Landscapes are something of an industrial conglomerate, packed with elaborate contraptions, the purposes of which are difficult to discern. Diaz has always had a longstanding fascination with the Industrial Revolution, a time which saw the emergence of the working class and changed production forever. Coincidentally, during the latter part of the 1800s, the amusement park was also created using many of the same feats of engineering employed within factories. The intersection of these two historical perspectives is where the Invented Landscapes dwell, fixated on the idea of construction. Diaz plays with the idea of construction on multiple levels, self-consciously collaging together an already manufactured world where “amusement” might also be viewed as a commodity. It becomes a façade with an underlying framework that cares little for the individual’s experience and more about what they are willing to pay to attain it: entertainment is a product itself, after all. His 2003 Invented Landscape emphasizes this to the extreme, showing a figure laying prone underneath a whirling buzz saw contraption attached to the desolate skeleton of an amusement park. Two hands reach from the foreground crossing a knife and some other tool, as if to signify something at odds. It seems that Diaz prods the viewer to ask themselves what they sacrifice for entertainment, knowingly or unknowingly. Do these technological marvels simultaneously trap one by their own hand later on? Or how much does one overlook to maintain an experience or spectacle?
Diaz graduated from the Center for Creative Studies (now College for Creative Studies) with a BFA in Photography in 1980. He went on to receive his MFA in Photography from the University of Michigan’s School of Art in 1983.
Written by Samantha Hohmann
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